Category: Women’s History

Post written by Kathy Bush, Discovery Agent.

Daily Discovery: Coffee Painting

Use your rockin’ creative skills and make your very own work of art using coffee as your medium!

Supplies:

• Coffee grounds &/or instant coffee – 1 spoonful
• Water color paint brushes
• Paper towel
• Clean water
• Water color paper
• Bottle caps

Instructions:

1. Tape your paper down if you fear it will buckle while working on it. Use the bottle caps to mix your coffee with fresh water, being careful to use only a little water at a time until you have a good shade. Test until you like what you have. Be aware that your painting will smell of coffee!
2. Draw two squares for an exercise when first learning to use this medium. Decide which one will be for a layering with coffee and which one will be for water layering.
3. Paint on the full space with coffee and let dry. The one square that is layered with coffee will be darker with each layer added while the square with water will become lighter. The sun is great for speeding up the drying time!
4. The paintings from the ground coffee will have a textured look as the grounds will be picked up by the brush. This texture will be delicate as it is easy to brush off, which can take some color off. Ground coffee needs to be fresh when painting. You can reuse coffee grounds for painting but each use will result in a weaker color that is more diluted. Paintings with coffee grounds will be more free form and can lose some definition and/or color as it dries.
   – Instant coffee paintings will be smoother and easy to work with. Instant coffee paintings will acquire a shiny look the more layers you do. It is more durable than ground coffee as it behaves.
5. Once you’re finished with your painting, it’s time to clean up! Thoroughly clean brushes, especially the ones with the coffee grounds in them as it gets caught in the tips. Have a dirty water cup for cleaning and a clean water cup for re-wetting the brushes. The paper towel is for cleaning the brush and picking coffee up from the painting if desired.

 

Want to download these directions? Click here for a handy PDF!

Follow along with our Daily Discovery! Click here for all activities that you can do at home.

Educational opportunities like this are supported in part by Fort Fund.

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Post written by Morgan Wilson, Museum Assistant for Collections.

Daily Discovery: Crazy Quilt Tie-Blanket

What even is a crazy quilt? It is a pieced together blanket that is all about looking good and does not follow a pattern or have the quilting stitches joining its front to its back that define true quilts. Crazy quilts are often full of souvenir ribbons, fancy fabrics, and embroidered or painted pictures. We have several crazy quilts in our collections at FCMOD. Check them out to get inspiration for your own. Today, we will be making a tie-blanket crazy quilt. There is no sewing required! Don’t worry if you make a mistake, it will just add to the craziness of the quilt!

Supplies:

• Fleece (2 yards total in at least 2 different colors but use as many as you like. Most fleece that you buy from a craft store will be 60 inches in width which is perfect for this project!)
• Scissors
• Tape Measure
• Colored pencil or fabric marker

Instructions:

1. Find a work surface to lay your fabric on.
2. Use the tape measure and colored pencil to lightly sketch a 12 x 12-inch square on the corner of one piece of fabric.
3. Cut out the square. You can use this first square as a template for the rest of them!
4. Using your template, cut the rest of the fabric into 12 x 12-inch squares.
5. Once you have all your squares cut out, take one square, your tape measure and pencil and mark every inch on each edge of the square.
6. Make a 2-inch cut on each mark. This will create fringe around the square and cut off the corners!
7. Repeat step 6 until all your squares have fringe.
8. Take two squares that you want to tie together and line them up so that the tabs are lined up with each other.
9. Double knot the tabs on either square together until you have 8 knots joining two squares together!
10. Continue tying squares together lengthwise until you have 5 squares in a row. Make 6 rows of 5 squares.
11. Now, join each row together width wise until you have a 5 x 6 square blanket –crazy!

Tips and Tricks:

• You may knot the fringe on the edges of the blanket to give it a more finished look.
• If your squares are not exactly even, that’s okay. As long as they all have an equal number of fringes it will come together just fine.
• You can arrange the squares in any pattern you like since a crazy quilt has no pattern.

Image Credit: The Spruce Crafts

Want to download these directions? Click here for a handy PDF!

Follow along with our Daily Discovery! Click here for all activities that you can do at home.

Educational opportunities like this are supported in part by Fort Fund.

Continue Reading